The Weekly Daley: Apocalypse du jour

The Supreme Court’s ruling Wednesday overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act is just the most recent calamity to destroy life in America as we know it. We will never be the same, just the way that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) ruined everything we hold near and dear a couple of years ago. Everything!

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Then-House Minority Leader John Boehner prophesied in March 2010 that the health care reform law represented “Armageddon, because it will ruin our country.”

A few months later, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (perhaps gearing up for his run at the White House) said, “Health reform will destroy the country because in the next year or so, America will have to dramatically cut the military because we can’t pay for it.” (I hadn’t noticed, but I guess it already happened?)

At about the same time, in October 2010, Oklahoma’s Sen. Tom Coburn lamented, “There will be no insurance industry left in three years.”

Here it is, almost three years later, and the demise of the insurance industry has neither been announced nor recently predicted.

In July 2009, Glenn Beck described the ACA as “the end of prosperity in America forever … the end of America as you know it.”

Now: “Supreme Court Decisions on Marriage: ‘Tragic Day for Marriage and our Nation,’ Said U.S. Catholic Bishops.”

A tragic day for marriage and our nation? Indeed? What would that look like? Would it look like John Boehner’s “Armageddon” or Rick Santorum’s “destruction of our country?” Will it signal the “end of prosperity in America” and finally bring Glenn Beck’s disaster prediction to fruition?

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee tweeted “5 people in robes said they are bigger than the voters of CA and Congress combined. And bigger than God. May He forgive us all.” (This is really hard to stomach. That we all need to be “forgiven” for anything is profoundly arrogant, self aggrandizing and shameful of Huckabee.)

Earlier the governor announced that “Jesus wept” as if He and Huckabee had been hanging out and watching the news on TV.

“Supreme Court overrules God,” was FOX News commentator Todd Starnes’ take on the decision. Take a hard look at this comment. Can he be serious, really? Or is he just priming the pump to get lots of responses from others who profess to know what God wants or doesn’t want and then show what a big success his program is?

What a bunch of Henny Pennys. Henny Pennys if they actually believe what they’re saying (which I doubt more often than not). Real rascals otherwise.

Social and political sea changes occur from time to time, and immediately there are those who capitalize on them by scaring the daylights out of their unsuspecting flocks or audiences or followers. I have no doubt that they will be announcing an abundance of Websites to which “their” kind of folks will send money to carry on the fight against Satan, socialism, gay people, the U.N. and general wrong-headedness of every stripe.

President Obama’s election was projected to end life as we know it, and his re-election was the triumph of all that is bad and the suppression of all that is good, according to many of these doomsayers. Look around and we see that many things have gotten better in the past few months, if we count the housing market and the stock market and the jobs reports generally.

Not long ago, I challenged my brother, the gloomy conservative to make a list detailing how bad things are for him and others like him on that very day, keep it safe and check back on it a year from now to see whether the government has meanwhile outlawed guns, ammunition, the Bible, confiscated thousands of square miles of private property and thrown hundreds of thousands of right-leaning dissenters in prison and generally run amok at our expense.

The reason I made that challenge is because he predicted those and other horrors when Obama was first elected back in ’08 and again last November. And like Boehner’s Armageddon, somehow they never came to pass. And like that Armageddon, the newest Apocalypse du jour is likely to have about the same impact.

Chris Daley is a staff writer and columnist for the Mountain Democrat. His column appears each Friday.